Have you heard
the story in the Bible of the prophet Hosea? It is one of the craziest stories
in there in terms of a relationship story. Hosea is called by the Lord to be
His prophet, but, in the strangest of ways. God says to him:
“When the LORD first spoke through Hosea, the LORD
said to Hosea, “Go, take to yourself a wife of whoredom and have children of
whoredom, for the land commits great whoredom by forsaking the LORD.” So he
went and took Gomer, the daughter of Diblaim, and she conceived and bore him a
son.” (Hosea
1:2-3 ESV).
That is the
second and third verse of the book. God says to him go and take a prostitute as
your wife; which Hosea does. She bears him three children, all of whom God gives
names I would not like to give my child, culminating in the third child, second
son, whom God said to name ‘You are not My People’. Hosea and his wife are
happy for a little while, but then she goes back to her old life as a
prostitute. Imagine how devastating that would have been for Hosea? He was told
by God to marry this woman, whom, in his day should have been stoned. Perhaps
at first he didn’t love her but then he did. He loved her and they had three
children together (though the Bible only specifically says one of the kids is
his). He might have felt as if, in marrying her, he rescued her from a life of
pain and sin and gave her a hope and a future. Then, as if he was nothing, she
ran back to her old life and became not only a prostitute but also an adulterer.
I wonder if I
was in that situation what would I do? Would I question God for making me marry
a woman who turned out to be unfaithful? Would I question God’s ability to choose,
that which is good for me? Hosea seems to be a little used in this story.
The thing God
does next is even more shocking though. He tells Hosea to go and buy her back.
So Hosea sets off, finds his wife and the man she is now with/she is now
working for, and pays him 15 shekels of silver (lots of monies) and buys back
his own wife. I imagine he was overjoyed to have her back but imagine having to
go buy your wife out of sexual slavery? What a horrible thing to have to do.
God had a point to all this pain and misery though and we will look at that
after a couple of questions.
Questions:
1.
What does this story teach us
about the love of God?
2. What does this story teach us about us, and how we respond to God?
3. What does this story teach us about loving others?
There was a point to the story of Hosea’s
personal life. God was showing, in a picture of a relationship, the
relationship He has with His people. The Israelites often turned away from God
and towards other gods and the picture is that they did it before He became
their God, so He bought them out of prostitution to God’s marriage, in which “I will be your God and you will be my
people.” (see Exodus 6:7, Leviticus 26:12, and Jeremiah 30:22 among others).
Following from this Israel turns away from God again and goes back to the old
ways of worshipping whatever God they please. But, just like Hosea bought back
Gomer, God bought back His people by the death of Christ on the cross. Hosea
showed his love in going and buying his wife out of her sinful life. Jesus did
the same: “But God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners,
Christ died for us.” (Romans 5:8
ESV)
No comments:
Post a Comment